How to Get Suppliers to Fill Out EcoVadis

The average EcoVadis response rate across industries is roughly 40%. That means for every 100 suppliers you invite to complete an EcoVadis assessment, 60 will not respond. You can beat that average, but it requires reaching the right person at each supplier, sending a clear ask with a deadline, following up consistently, and applying escalation levers for the long tail of non-responders.

This guide covers the practical steps for running an EcoVadis supplier campaign, from initial outreach through final escalation. The same principles apply to CDP climate disclosure requests, supplier sustainability questionnaires, and similar programs where you depend on suppliers to take action.

Why Response Rates Are Low

Before fixing the problem, it helps to understand why suppliers do not respond.

Wrong Contact

The most common reason. EcoVadis invitations are often sent to the commercial or purchasing contact on file. A sustainability lead at a Fortune 500 medical device company described this directly: “A lot of our purchase orders give us access to the financial folks. But those people change roles, they leave the company. It isn’t a sustainability person. So they just ignore the emails we send.”

If the invitation goes to someone who does not own sustainability at their company, it sits in their inbox until it disappears.

No Internal Sustainability Function

Many suppliers, especially mid-market and smaller companies, do not have a dedicated sustainability person. They may have never heard of EcoVadis. The invitation arrives and nobody knows what to do with it.

Perceived Cost and Effort

EcoVadis assessments require time to complete. The supplier needs to gather documentation across environment, labor practices, ethics, and sustainable procurement. For a first-time respondent, this can take 20-40 hours of work spread across multiple departments. Suppliers weigh that effort against their other priorities and often defer.

No Perceived Consequence

If the supplier does not believe there is a commercial consequence for ignoring the request, they will not prioritize it. Especially when the request comes from one customer among many.

Assessment Fatigue

Large suppliers receive EcoVadis, CDP, and custom sustainability questionnaire requests from dozens of customers simultaneously. The volume creates fatigue and forces suppliers to triage, responding to the loudest or most commercially important customers first.

Step 1: Identify and Prioritize Your Supplier List

You cannot effectively campaign all suppliers at once. Start by segmenting:

Tier 1 (top priority): Suppliers representing the largest share of your spend, your highest-risk categories, or those in sectors with elevated ESG exposure (chemicals, raw materials, heavy manufacturing).
Tier 2 (second wave): Suppliers of moderate spend or risk. These often represent the bulk of your list.
Tier 3 (long tail): Low-spend, low-risk suppliers. You may choose to request EcoVadis only from Tier 1 and 2 initially, and address Tier 3 later.

A sustainability lead at a Fortune 500 medical device company focused on the top 500 suppliers first and achieved a 60% response rate. That still meant 200 suppliers never responded. The remaining suppliers would require additional effort and different tactics.

Step 2: Find the Right Contact

This is where most campaigns fail before they begin. Sending the EcoVadis invitation to the wrong person guarantees non-response.

For each supplier, identify the person who is most likely to own or coordinate the EcoVadis assessment:

Sustainability Manager or Director: The ideal contact at larger suppliers.
EHS (Environment, Health, and Safety) Manager: Common at manufacturing companies that have environmental programs but no dedicated sustainability title.
Quality Manager: At some companies, quality and sustainability overlap or are managed by the same person.
General Manager or Owner: At small suppliers without a dedicated function.

Do not rely solely on the contact in your ERP. See How to Find the Right Contact at a Supplier for detailed methods.

The same sustainability lead described the challenge of sourcing contacts at scale. When exploring consultant options, they were quoted 5-8 full-time people over 4-12 weeks just to find the right contacts. Contact discovery at scale is its own operational challenge.

Step 3: Draft the Initial Ask

The first email or message should be short, clear, and actionable. Suppliers need to understand three things immediately:

What you are asking: “We are requesting that your company complete an EcoVadis sustainability assessment.”
Why it matters to them: “EcoVadis scores are increasingly used in procurement decisions across our industry. Your score will be visible to all customers who subscribe to EcoVadis, not just us.”
What the deadline is: Give a specific date at least 6-8 weeks out to allow time for the supplier to register, gather data, and complete the assessment.

Additional elements that improve response rates:

Name the commercial relationship. “As a supplier to [Your Company Name]…” makes the request specific rather than generic.
Include a direct link to the EcoVadis platform and the invitation.
Offer support. “If you have questions about the process, reply to this email and we can walk you through it.”
Keep it under 200 words. Long introductory emails with paragraphs about your sustainability strategy do not get read.

Step 4: Follow-Up Cadence

Plan for a minimum of 3-5 follow-ups over the campaign period. A single email will not work for the majority of suppliers.

Touchpoint	Timing	Action
Initial invitation	Day 0	Send the request with clear instructions and deadline
Follow-up 1	Day 10-14	Resend to the same contact. Reference the original email date
Follow-up 2	Day 21-28	Try an alternate contact if the first has not engaged. Restate the deadline
Follow-up 3	Day 35-42	Escalation email (see below)
Final notice	Day 49-56	Formal notification of consequences for non-response

A Senior SQE at a Fortune 100 life sciences company described the follow-up fatigue: “You reach out 2, 3, 4, 5 times. Nobody responds. You just give up.” The goal of a structured cadence is to prevent exactly that. Automated reminders remove the emotional burden and ensure no supplier falls through the cracks.

Step 5: Escalation Levers

For the 30-50% of suppliers who do not respond to direct outreach, you need escalation tools:

Executive-to-Executive Communication

A message from your VP of Procurement or Chief Sustainability Officer to the supplier’s leadership carries different weight than an email from a sustainability analyst. Use this lever selectively for strategically important suppliers.

Commercial Consequences

Tie the EcoVadis response to procurement decisions. Options include:

Requiring an EcoVadis score as a condition for contract renewal
Including EcoVadis participation in your supplier scorecard
Making EcoVadis a weighted criterion in RFP evaluations
Notifying the supplier that non-response will be escalated to your sourcing team

Commercial consequences are the single most effective escalation lever. Suppliers respond when they believe their business is at stake.

Peer Pressure and Transparency

Some companies publish supplier sustainability performance in annual reports, naming high performers and noting non-responders. The prospect of being publicly identified as non-participatory motivates some suppliers to act.

Offer a Shared Assessment

Remind suppliers that an EcoVadis score is reusable. They complete one assessment and share it with all their customers who use EcoVadis. This reframing turns the request from “do this for us” into “do this once and benefit across your customer base.”

Step 6: Handle the Long Tail

Even after escalation, some suppliers will not respond. For these:

Document the effort. Record every touchpoint. This demonstrates due diligence to auditors and stakeholders.
Use spend-based estimation. For Scope 3 reporting or portfolio-level assessments, use industry-average data for suppliers who do not respond. This is accepted under GHG Protocol and CDP guidelines as a fallback.
Reassess the relationship. If a supplier consistently refuses to engage on sustainability, that is a risk signal worth surfacing to your procurement team.
Try again next cycle. Response rates improve over time as suppliers become familiar with the platform and as industry expectations solidify.

Applying This to CDP Climate Disclosure

The same dynamics apply to CDP supply chain disclosure campaigns. CDP reports an average supplier response rate of approximately 40-50% for the supply chain program. The tactics are identical: find the sustainability contact, send a clear request with a deadline, follow up persistently, and escalate through commercial channels.

The key difference is that CDP is focused specifically on climate and environmental data, while EcoVadis covers a broader set of sustainability topics. Some suppliers may already have a CDP score from responding to the investor questionnaire, which simplifies the ask.

Response Rate Benchmarks

For context when setting internal targets:

Industry average (EcoVadis): ~40% supplier response rate
Industry average (CDP supply chain): ~40-50% supplier response rate
Well-run campaign with dedicated follow-up: 55-65% response rate
Campaign with executive sponsorship and commercial consequences: 70-80%+ for strategic suppliers

The sustainability lead at a Fortune 500 medical device company achieved 60% from the top 500 suppliers, which is above average but still left 200 suppliers unaccounted for. Closing that last 40% is where the real operational challenge begins.

Where Bridgecurrent Fits

Bridgecurrent handles the two hardest parts of an EcoVadis or CDP campaign: finding the sustainability contact at each supplier and automating the follow-up sequence until the supplier responds or is flagged for escalation. Instead of quoting 5-8 people over weeks to source contacts, teams set up a campaign and Bridgecurrent handles discovery and outreach. Learn more about automated supplier outreach.